I didn’t know imagetostl took glbs! I honestly wouldn’t even have expected it!

I’ll definitely be using that then. Blender is great, but I’m tied to one machine - I’d much rather use online tools when I can.

Thanks for that :)

If you have at least one of each piece remaining, then yep - it’s easy!

The technology you’re after is called photogrammetry, and there are two inexpensive ways that I use often (there are more, but these are the two I rely on)

1. KIRI Engine - I have a subscription, but I think there is a free tier. You take about twenty photos of the object from different angles, upload for processing, and you get a 3D model back that you can print.

2. TRELLIS - take a single photograph and upload to here:

https://huggingface.co/spaces/JeffreyXiang/TRELLIS

You will receive a 3D model back that you can import into Blender, run a mesh operation to merge by distance (to create a watertight model), export as STL and then print.

KIRI Engine requires more work upfront, with all the photos, but is the best at recreating existing things accurately.

TRELLIS requires more work at the end, because it doesn’t automatically create printable models, and it isn’t a finished product yet, but it is the closest thing to actual witchcraft I’ve experienced.

It’s a neat idea, similar to how displacement maps affect the output without affecting the geometry of a 3D render.

Also, I like this image, as it makes me feel less bad about my own grizzly-looking heat block.

Overhangs were the biggest issue I found. So much so that I moved back to a 0.4 after a month of faff trying to find settings that would compensate.

I use my printer mainly for minis, and figures that would print supportless on the 0.4 nozzle needed huge amounts of supports at 0.2 in order to print without missing chins etc.

That said, the level of detail that I could achieve was better, particularly on the hair, but not enough to compensate for all of the extra faff and wasted plastic.

At the very simplest, you can just overlap things in the slicer without Blender.

If you want to learn about Blender’s Sculpt mode, you can just Google “Blender Sculpt mode tutorial”. For convenience, try to use the most recent results, as the interface can be slightly different in older versions.

Sculpt mode effectively allows you to alter the models as if they were made of clay or plasticine.

A lot of the tutorials will be showing how to make things from scratch, but what’s important is that you see how the tools work.

Once you have everything overlapping the way you want, you can join the using a Boolean operation. You’ll want to use a “union” operation.

To avoid the gaps you can line them up with an overlap.

You can adjust the vertices of the model slightly to help facilitate this. The most natural-feeling way to do it in Blender is by using the Sculpt mode.

You can use a Boolean addition operation to then make the two models a single piece of geometry. Or not bother (if you are printing on FDM or at 100% infill in resin, it won’t really hurt either way).

I mostly print stuff for DnD and wargaming, so I just run off a few 25mm bases - I can always use them!

Fwiw, I don’t recommend an ender. Admittedly it’s capable of great things, but certainly not out of the box.

Although it’s not a huge selection, the best printer I’ve used in terms of ease and quality is the FLSun Q5. Prints great out of the box, auto-levels, easy to repair, plus it’s a delta (which are just magical to watch).

I shudder to think what the answer to this will be, but… How do you propose this should be done?

Exactly this. I still use a 0.4 nozzle and the results are more than satisfactory.

These figures were all support-free designs by EC3D, and are a joy to print.

At 0.08mm layers, you can feel the lines with a fingernail, but can’t see the from more than a few cm away.